Category Archives: South Carolina

Lee Bandy was at Rotary today!

I was blessed with a pleasant surprise today at the Columbia Rotary Club meeting — Lee Bandy! He was there as a guest of member Joe Jones.

It was awesome to get to see Lee, my good friend and longtime colleague — tanned, rested and ready. More than two decades ago, the guy had to put up with me as his editor, and he’s never held it against me.

For you youngsters, Lee was the dean of SC political journalism until his retirement four or five years ago. Who replaced him as dean? Well, they retired the position.

Good column by Warren about Jim Manning

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I’ve never been a fan of Jim Manning’s short career as a Richland County councilman. In fact, on the day after the 2008 election, I saw Manning’s election as the biggest disappointment of the night. At the time, I was mostly upset that Manning had replaced an excellent incumbent, despite offering no good reasons as to why he would do a better job.It was a monument to party line voting over merit, the starkest that I saw in the 2008 election.

Mr. Manning is a nice, friendly guy, and I’ve only had pleasant interactions with him. But little that he has done since Election Night has caused me to feel better about his election.

Friday, Warren Bolton had a good column on the subject, inspired most immediately by a shocking action by Richland County Council in June:

IT SHOULDN’T come as a shock that Richland County Councilman Jim Manning insisted on raising property taxes in Richland 2 to the maximum allowed under state law against the school board’s wishes.

It’s the kind of thing for which he’s become known. While Mr. Manning characterizes himself as one who’s willing to make bold proposals and stand by them, at times his efforts are misguided, lack sound judgment and trample the tenets of good stewardship and sound policy making…

Jim Manning

Mr. Manning utterly failed to justify his action. It was apparently based in vague notions that more should be spent on education (without regard to whether there is any sort of plan for spending it). Some of you — Doug, for instance — probably think I would do just what the councilman did. I wouldn’t. Oh, I might fight for the district’s request, if it seemed justified within the context in which it was presented. But I would never dream of saying, “Oh, here’s some more money you didn’t ask for.”

Of course, the really shocking thing here is that the council went along with him on it. We wouldn’t be talking about this at all if he had not. I don’t know all the dynamics of that; I haven’t spoken with the other council members and for some reason I don’t see the minutes of that meeting on the county website. Here are the minutes of the previous meeting, at which the matter was apparently discussed. They are a bit hard to follow. There were procedural votes that split along party lines, but in the end the vote was unanimous. Under such circumstances, I would have to have been there and heard what was said to fully understand the way it unfolded. But as Warren points out, with Mr. Manning, we have a pattern emerging:

This isn’t the first time Mr. Manning has left people scratching their heads.

He led a misguided effort to weaken the county’s smoking ban by allowing any establishment to operate “a portion of its workplace” as a “designated smoking area” if it is separate from the nonsmoking area and has its own outside entrance and a separate heating and air system; that would have required some employees to work in smoking areas. While the change was sold as an attempt to address concerns of a single bingo operator along Decker Boulevard in Mr. Manning’s district, it would have opened the door to all businesses, including bars and restaurants. The council wisely nixed the measure.

Prior to Mr. Manning taking office, County Council — worried about clutter, among other things — had banned new billboards in unincorporated areas. It later reaffirmed that stance by rebuffing attempts to expand the use of electronic billboards, which many worried would distract drivers. Once Mr. Manning joined the council, he teamed with Councilwoman Gwendolyn Kennedy to revive the electronic billboard issue and turn what once was a slim majority against them into a decided majority in favor….

Warren also cited Mr. Manning’s odd feud with County Administrator Milton Pope. He forgot one memorable incident, though — one I wrote about here, when he tried to get a high-stakes bingo on Decker Boulevard, before backing down in the face of strong community opposition (including from his own pastor).

Warren speculated that thanks to what the Council has done at Mr. Manning’s behest, “Even though it’s not at fault, Richland 2 could feel some backlash from the business community.” Oh, I think you can count on it. Since the Legislature in its “wisdom” relieved homeowners entirely from supporting school with their property taxes, the burden of supporting this whimsy falls heavily on business. And “business” in this case includes owners of rental property — which generally means rents going up for those who can’t afford to own a home.

According to Warren, Mr. Manning has a response when people criticize him, because he’s used to it:

“People have been reacting to me like that since I was in kindergarten,” he said.

I recently asked him what he meant by that.

“Kindergarten is the first time that I remember that I had to interact with an organized institution,” he said. “Ever since I’ve had to interact with organized institutions I have not toed the line.”

Set aside that he has been elected to represent real people in an organized institution. As Warren points out in the headline, this isn’t kindergarten. And nobody legitimately expects an elected official to “toe the line.” He’s there to use his best judgment in representing the people who elected him.

The key word there is “judgment.”

Warren’s column accompanied an editorial in which The State said:

Mr. Manning acknowledges that he didn’t scour the district’s budget and find holes that needed to be plugged or valuable programs that needed funding. He said district officials didn’t ask him to intervene. He also said he doesn’t care what the money is spent on; he just wants the district to have the money and is sure it will find something worthwhile to spend it on.

Richland 2 officials said they intend to spend the money forced upon them wisely, but they have gone to great pains to make it clear that they didn’t want the increased budget. Over the years, officials in the largest and fastest growing Midlands district have proven responsible and adept at handling their budget — and at asking for what’s needed to operate schools.

With the economy in the state it’s in and only businesses and automobiles being charged school operating taxes, District 2’s elected board — not unlike other conscientious elected officials — understands that keeping businesses open and people employed is crucial. So the board sought to balance the district’s needs with those of taxpaying constituents. But County Council, in its flawed wisdom and for no defensible or even clearly articulable reason, overruled the district.

Indeed.

“South Carolina’s Young Governor Has a High Profile… ” well, I can’t argue with THAT part

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Before we leave this subject entirely…

The governor’s memoir is one thing. We don’t expect much from it, and we probably won’t be disappointed. But there was a time when I expected something from the nation’s leading newspapers. I still do, from some. But it looks like The New York Times has fallen down on the job. Big-time.

I thought that maybe, after all the hagiographic, fawning coverage the national media had given our governor during the election campaign last year (“She’s a woman! An Indian-American woman! In the South! And she’s a reformer — she said so!”), that maybe the NYT was starting to get it when they subtitled a piece awhile back, with this bitter truism: “Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, doesn’t care what you think.”

But over the weekend, the Times came out with a piece that was worse, shallower, more sycophantic, than anything we saw last year. The lede:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Nikki Haley, at 39 the nation’s youngest governor, loves her iPod.

It gets worse from there. Get this:

She has built a governorship on aggressive budget cutting, a relentless pursuit of job growth and a cheerleader’s enthusiasm for a state that often finishes toward the back of the pack in education, economics and health.

“We are now what every state is going to want to look like,” Ms. Haley said in an interview in her office almost six months into her administration.

I don’t even know what it means. Does it mean that she cheers for the fact that her state “finishes toward the back of the pack in education, economics and health,” and that she thinks other states envy us because of that? The first part may be accurate, but could even Nikki Haley think the second part?

Check this:

She has repeatedly said she is not interested in being a vice-presidential running mate on the 2012 Republican ticket, but her name is already etched into the list of future party leaders.

And etched in our hearts, as well. And this:

Back home, legislators say her administration is a refreshing change from the tumultuous days of her predecessor, Mark Sanford, whose uncooperative relations with elected officials is legend around the Statehouse. She has also received good marks for fighting to lowerMedicaid costs and for many of her cabinet appointments.

No really, it actually says that. Whom did they talk to? Which legislators said she was a “refreshing change,” or any kind of a change?

Who wrote this? Rob Godfrey?

It ends with this standard from her stump speech:

“You can feel the energy. You can feel the buzz,” she said. “It’s because people are incredibly excited about their government and elected officials are incredibly scared and it’s a beautiful thing.”

And that’s really the way she thinks. So that part was right. It didn’t tell us anything new, but it was accurate.

Cindi Scoppe explains the state budget

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A couple of weeks ago, in response to some outrageous statement about the state budget put out by someone over at the Policy Council via Twitter — I forget now who it was, or what it was he or she said, but I think it was something like “this is the biggest budget ever” — I got worked up enough to go out and get some numbers showing what total nonsense that was. Because I knew we hadn’t caught up to pre-crash spending levels.

And I got the numbers, covering the last few years. And there were supporting documents, which are hard to link on WordPress (I usually go back and use TypePad on my old blog to link a file, then copy the code over here, which is tedious), and then there was the post itself to write talking about the numbers, and somewhere in the middle of it I fell asleep or something.

Oh, wait, I know — I sent Ashley Landess a Tweet asking her something about the numbers they had used, and while she answered my initial question, she didn’t (unless I missed it) answer a follow-up, and I used waiting for that response as an excuse to just let the whole thing drift, because I had satisfied my own curiosity and justified my own outrage (this is not, of course, the biggest budget ever), and it’s hard for me to maintain interest in numbers for very long. (By the way, I’m not blaming Ashley for not answering me a second time. In fact, maybe she did and it got lost in the ether. Nobody can watch that stuff all day, or read all of it, even when alerted to it.)

Then, a few days ago, Doug got on this kick of throwing HIS favorite numbers at us (similar to the Policy Council numbers, including federal spending and probably lottery money and the kitchen sink and all kinds of stuff that the Legislature has no control over, even though what we were talking about was the budget the Legislature was voting on), and did his usual thing of “Where are YOUR numbers?” and thumping his chest and all, and I thought about going back and digging up the real numbers and answering him, but I was then filled with ennui, because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, and I just wasn’t interested enough.

Because I know how bogus the whole conversation is. I experience state government. I follow what’s happening. I see the cuts, year after year. After all, we have 8,000 fewer state employees than in 1994, as Cindi Scoppe notes today (see, I just threw number at you, but I didn’t have to spend time digging them up, which is what matters to me)…

In fact, that is my purpose in posting on this subject. Cindi never gets bored looking at the budget, and she understands it better than most people, certainly better than most of the people who get to vote on it. Consider her an enabler of my fecklessness on the subject. I had her to worry about the budget for me for most of 22 years.

And she’s still doing it. In her column headlined “The fable of the spendthrift Legislature,” she summed it up pretty well. (It would have been a wonder if she hadn’t. The freaking thing was 30 inches long. But as I told her, “It read like 18.” Old editor joke.)

It’s worth a read. It puts things into perspective. It explains why it’s so bogus for Nikki Haley to perpetuate the myth (as did Mark Sanford) that the lawmakers are a bunch of spendthrifts out there “growing government” at a rate that exceeds the kind of bogus arbitrary caps that those two governors AND House leaders are always on about.

By the way, while the Senate won’t go along with arbitrary caps (thank goodness; they still believe in representative democracy instead of government by formula), in recent years we’ve stayed well within that population-plus-inflation formulation. The average annual increase in the general fund has been 2.4 percent since 1994 (the year the Republicans took over), including the non-recurring portion. The recurring part has grown by 1.8 percent a year.

And lawmakers are still appropriating less than they did five years ago. So these are not the biggest budgets ever.

Man, this is boring…

Photojournalism is harder than it looks, huh?

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Some people think all you need is a camera. Such as my ADCO colleague who sent me the above photo from the Peach Festival yesterday, together with a message telling me that “Haley was here, but [my correspondent] was distracted and totally missed the photo.”

Yeah, I guess you did miss it. Apparently, you were distracted by the spectacle of the ubiquitous Joe Wilson, whom few of us have ever known to miss a parade.

Maybe Joe should miss a few, and work on catching up on those bills. Not that I’m criticizing. I know what it’s like to have trouble keeping up with the checkbook (which is why my wife does it at our house), but you just have to buckle down and do it, Joe.

It’s still sinking in: We have two-time, back-to-back, National Champions

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Well, it was certainly Famously Hot today. Particularly walking there and back. But worth it. (Actually, as you might be able to tell from the great vantage point and the slight glare/reflection on the window, I watched a good bit of this from the coolness of the Capital City Club. But hey, I did walk there and back.)

It’s a great day for, let’s see… South Carolina, Columbia, the University, and for baseball. Because those young guys showed how the game ought to be played — steadily, honestly, with mastery of all the basics, and as a team. I’m not even going to get into how communitarian (and how very non-Tea Party) that is, because I don’t want to spoil the day with politics.

Great job, boys. You’ll treasure this day for the rest of your lives. So will everybody else around here.

It’s just not hip and edgy to criticize Nikki Haley any more. What am I going to do now?

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Back in 2008 (when this was taken), before she reinvented herself and started running for offices for which she was completely unqualified, I used to write supportive things about Nikki Haley. Could I do so again?

I’m going to have to start sticking up for Nikki Haley. If I can possibly rationalize a way to do so.

The thing is, everybody — except the people on her staff who are paid to say otherwise — is criticizing her. Especially, of course, Republicans. Just as with Mark Sanford.

That makes criticizing Nikki Haley, well… popular. Like Reality TV. Like, you know, “The Situation.” This is disturbing. It is so uncool. So unhip.

More to the point, what’s the use of sitting down at a laptop to say critical things if everyone is doing it? It’s just… redundant. If you don’t have anything new or original to say, why write?

I mean, speaking of “The Situation,” look at this one:

The “Wide Chasm:” Kenny Bingham — the House Majority Leader, from Lexington County no less — got a standing ovation when he stood up to light into her in the House the other day, furious that GOP lawmakers had done what they thought she wanted, only to have her veto it. If senators had been there, they’d have applauded too. It’s taken Nikki WAY less time to alienate the State House than it took her predecessor.
The Departing SLED Chief: Reggie Lloyd says he totally blew off the gov’s effort to get him to refuse raises to hard-working, lower-ranking agents.
Michael Haley’s list: The SLED chief also said the “first man” presented him with a list of people he wanted Lloyd to hire as agents.
He can’t hold it back any more: After trying to hold it in for a year, Wesley Donehue has taken to expressing typical Republican frustration with the gov via Twitter: “Very proud of the SC General Assembly for overriding Gov Haley’s presidential primary veto today. Great work team!” And especially with her campaign manager… I mean, chief of staff: “This is what happens when your Chief of Staff isn’t from South Carolina. Everyone say THANK YOU TIM PEARSON!” Poor Wesley. He’s been trying to control himself for so long.

This creates a dilemma. Every once in a while, Nikki does something right. Should I just not mention her at all until those occasions arise?

Or maybe I should just try a little harder, and find ways to explain the problems with her leadership in original terms, ones that others aren’t thinking of. That could work…

The rambling monument

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By the way, if you were surprised when I told you back here that the Confederate monument has not always been in the most prominent location in Columbia, you might be interested to read this excerpt from a column I wrote for July 2, 2000 — the day after the flag moved from the dome to the monument:

Well, here’s a fun fact to know and tell: The state’s official monument to Confederate soldiers was not always in that location. In fact, that isn’t even the original monument.

I had heard this in the past but just read some confirmation of it this past week, in a column written in 1971 by a former State editor. When I called Charles Wickenberg, who is now retired, to ask where he got his facts, he wasn’t sure after all these years. But the folks at the S.C. Department of Archives and History were able to confirm the story for me. It goes like this:

The original monument , in fact, wasn’t even on the State House grounds. It was initially erected on Arsenal Hill, but a problem developed – it was sitting on quicksand. So it was moved to the top of a hill at the entrance of Elmwood cemetery.

The monument finally made it to the State House grounds in 1879. But it didn’t go where it is now. It was placed instead “near the eastern end of the building, about 60 feet from the front wall and 100 feet from the present site,” Mr. Wickenberg wrote.

But another problem developed: The monument kept getting struck by lightning. “The last stroke” hit on June 22, 1882, and demolished the stone figure.

At this point, if I were one of the folks in charge of this monument , I might have started to wonder about the whole enterprise. But folks back then were made of sterner stuff, and they soldiered on, so to speak.

At this point a new base was obtained, with stirring words inscribed upon it, and “a new statue, chiseled in Italy,” placed at the top. On May 9, 1884, the new monument was unveiled and dedicated in the same location in which we find it today.

Of course, my purpose in writing that was to suggest, The thing doesn’t have to stay there! There were, and are, plenty of other places for it — places that seemed quite suitable to the generation that actually experienced the War.

Why not a triumphal arch for the Gamecocks?

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I’ll be at the parade for the National Champion Gamecocks on Friday, and I’m sure it will be great, but… we had a parade last year. And we flew a flag from the State House, etc.

All of that was very fine. But it seems like when they win the championship two years in a row, we ought to do something exponentially bigger. Something that really shows some lasting, monumental pride in the new Gamecock dynasty.

Yesterday, I was exchanging Tweets with Aaron Sheinin about the big win (he called it a “Great win for the common man”), when it hit me, and I responded:

If we don’t build a triumphal arch in front of the State House, we’ll never have a better chance. (Hey, I think I’ll blog that.)

Why not? Just move the Confederate soldier monument, and its flag, back to Elmwood Cemetery where it used to be (bet you didn’t know that), and replace it with something on the order of the monument they have in Paris, or Washington Square, or the Marble Arch in London?

This afternoon I heard SC Commerce Sec. Bobby Hitt touting the Gamecocks achievement as a sign to the world (and really, to ourselves) of what we can do in South Carolina if we work as a team. Instead of, I would add, fighting with each other all the time.

Wouldn’t that be awesome? Isn’t it high time that we start defining ourselves in terms of a famous victory, instead of our historic defeat? Isn’t it time to stop wallowing in the biggest mistake our (or any other) state ever made, and proclaim to the world just how great we can be?

I think so.

Going through vetoes like a hot knife through butter

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Good thing that Adam Beam is really into Twitter, too. Because I have relied upon John O’Connor to keep me up on what’s happening at the State House.

And today, he’s Tweeting about lawmakers rapidly working their way through Nikki Haley’s vetoes. Eventually, he put it all together on thestate.com. (That is, he put together what they’d done so far. They appear to still be going.) An excerpt:

The House voted to override Haley’s veto of $56 million for K-12 education by a 97-8 margin. Members of the Republican-controlled House then voted 103-6 to restore $12.4 million for new school buses. Haley, also a Republican, had vetoed the money, saying she wanted to privatize the bus system. The House also voted to restore another $20 million for schools, 89-18, which Haley had vetoed.

In other overrides, the House voted to restore:

• $1.9 million for the state Arts Commission.

• Almost $6 million for S.C. ETV.

• $1.1 million for University Center in Greenville by 89-22.

• $594,000 for Greenville Technical College by 78-31.

• $1.4 million for a program to help students with the high school-to-college transition by 82-28.

• Some state financing for next year’s GOP presidential primary.

Sounds like lawmakers have gotten just about as impatient with Nikki as they had with her predecessor.

O’Connor to explore new journalistic frontier

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John O'Connor, looking all self-conscious at the Capital City Club this morning, on account of someone taking his picture. I need to come up with a sneakier way to do that.

More than 2,200 Twitter followers have been sorry to hear that John O’Connor is leaving The State. But they needn’t worry. He’ll keep Tweeting. He just might have to change his avatar.

John is moving to Tampa to work for NPR. The really cool thing about this is that it’s a new initiative. Not many journalists get to plow new ground. Oh, sure, there are thousands of us blogging and Tweeting away out here. What I mean is, not many of us get to try something new and get a steady paycheck for it.

NPR is hiring people to cover specific issues on the state level. John will be covering education in Florida. The emphasis will be on computer-assisted reporting — lots of number-crunching, to measure what is working and what isn’t. Florida has the reputation nationally of being willing to try anything, and it has: vouchers, charter schools, teacher evaluations (which may or may not be connected to merit pay; I’m not sure), and so forth. Currently, it’s doing all these things under one of the most unpopular governors in the country, so it’s quite a political stew. Although John will be concentrating more on the policy and the numbers than on the politics.

This will mean a lot of people (even more, he hopes) will continue to follow his Tweets, since the nation watches Florida on education policy. He will probably still have something to say occasionally about SC, since he’s been here for eight years and has been at the middle of so much here, covering the State House.

John will supplement his radio reports with a blog, which I will make sure to add to my blogroll as soon as it’s up and running.

He’s really pumped about the new opportunity, not least because the Orioles train in Sarasota (John’s from Baltimore). I look forward to watching him have great success in this cool new endeavor.

In case you wondered — Adam Beam (another of The State’s most aggressive users of social media) is moving from City Hall to cover John’s State House beat. And veteran Clif LeBlanc is taking Adam’s place covering the city.

Well, they did it. Again.

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Don’t know what to say, except those boys are just deadly competent. No, way beyond that. They just do it right, play after play. Real baseball. Solid. Constant. Superb.

And we have a national champion again. Or still. Or however you say it. We’ve never had to say this before. That’s OK. We could get used to it.

Actually, I guess we’ll have to, right?

Video: IED exercise at Fort Jackson (WARNING — lots of simulated blood)

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I mentioned this the other day in my post about the Fort Jackson tour. I shot a lot of video that day — and if I could figure out how to edit iPhone video (when I call it up in my PC-based editing software, the sound drops out), I’d give you a video overview of the tour.

Instead, here is one unedited scene from the tour (I can upload a complete clip directly to YouTube; I just can’t edit it). It’s the most dramatic.

We were warned before we went in that we would see a lot of fake blood — particularly flowing from the sophisticated mannequin. There were two real soldiers in there with fake wounds, and you’ll hear them moaning over the recorded sounds of battle. But the mannequin had the most horrific wounds — both legs missing. The mannequin moves as well as bleeding. We were also told not to be surprised that it was “anatomically correct,” and was wounded in that area, too. There were ladies in our group. Of course, there were ladies among the soldiers going through the exercise, as well.

The scenario was that three soldiers’ humvee had just hit an IED. The mission of the recruits was to secure the site, treat the wounded, and prepare them for evacuation. One of the main challenges was to stop the mannequin’s profuse bleeding with tourniquets.

The trainees had learned about such situations in the classroom, but this was their first hands-on simulation of this kind, with all the sights and sounds. One of the recruits was appointed to be squad leader, and they were thrown into this under the watchful eyes of instructors. You will see four soldiers assume defensive positions with their rifles (the challenge for them was to keep their eyes looking outward, since they were staring at blank walls) while the rest of the squad deals with the wounded. I assume the soldier you see moving about among the group checking on everything was the squad leader.

One thing you can’t see — it was pretty hot in there. We were indoors, but there was no air-conditioning. A little added stress for the exercise.

And yeah, we were standing right on top of them. The room wasn’t very big. We just tried not to get in the way.

A photographic slice of SC political history

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Thought y’all might be interested in this huge (about as tall as I am) poster over at GOP HQ. Chad Connelly and Matt Moore showed it to me when I arrived for the interview this morning.

They didn’t know where it came from — they found it when they moved in to the HQ — but they assume from the available clues in the photo that it’s from 1960. Note (if you can; this being too big to put on a scanner, I just shot a picture of it with my iPhone — and it was pretty grainy to start with):

The prophetic declaration, “DIXIE IS NO LONGER IN THE BAG” — which was not yet true from a GOP perspective.
What you can’t see around the slogan “ALL FOR NIXON” is the names of Old South states (they were hard to see in the original, too).
At least one, and probably other, leaflets on the ground say “Kennedy!”
I was amused at the van near the State House steps that said “Wilson” on the back. Seems like Joe’s always been in politics, doesn’t it?
The flags, which are located far below the dome, and of course do not include the Confederate flag. This is before the General Assembly and Fritz Hollings put the Dixie flag up to mark the Civil War centennial. Are there also flags atop the dome, or were there no flags there then? I don’t know.
The men wearing hats. After JFK won South Carolina and the presidency, he put a stop to that style. Or so they say.
The license plate on the hearse, which provides proof that Paul was dead before we’d even heard of the Beatles.

OK, I was kidding on that last one. Y’all have fun with the picture, too.

“The Brad Show:” SC GOP Chairman Chad Connelly

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Welcome to another guerrilla edition (as in, shot by me out in the field rather than the studio) of “The Brad Show.”

Our guest today: Chad Connelly, the new chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.

I spoke with Chad over at the party HQ this morning. Since this was my first sit-down with him, I wanted to cover the bases — ask him to talk a bit about his background, etc. So we did.

But the hot topic — and if you can’t wait to get to it, it starts at 4:15 on the clip — was Gov. Nikki Haley’s threatened veto of funding for the SC GOP presidential primary in January.

Some highlights of that discussion:

He said there will be a presidential primary here, “no matter what.”
He said presidential primaries are so important that next time the Democrats have one, he’d be the first to support their bid for similar funding.
Total cost is a million dollars. Or maybe 1.5 million.
He expects to speak with the governor about it, and try to impress upon her the importance of the funding, this week. He’ll also be talking with legislative leaders.
Can General Assembly override a veto? “Yes,” he said.

Enjoy the show. This one is actually a bit shorter than most, which I hope you will appreciate. I asked about as many question as usual, but Mr. Connelly is a very focused speaker, which I guess adds up since that is his profession. It’s not that his answers were so short. It’s just that he said what he had to say to answer me, and stopped. Not many people do that.

Touring Fort Jackson

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I spent more than half of Thursday on a tour, sponsored by the Greater Columbia Chamber, of Fort Jackson. It was kind of weird that I’d never done this. I’ve been to Fort Jackson more times than I can count, but had never seen much more than the golf course and the other more public facilities. Even though I’ve always known what Fort Jackson is for, as the Army’s largest basic training base — I had never actually witnessed any of the training. About the closest I had ever com was hearing automatic weapons fired in the distance while I was playing golf.

On Thursday, I saw a lot, and it was impressive. The basic outline of our tour:

We heard remarks from Maj. Gen. James Milano. He gave us the overview about what they do at the place where 50 percent of all U.S. soldiers, and 60 percent of the females, receive initial training. Just one interesting factoid: Only one in four recruits measures up. “That’s a national crisis,” said the general. The biggest disqualifying factor? Obesity, and just generally being out of shape. Young people today just aren’t as physically active as earlier generations, and too many have grown up on junk food. A lot of what they do at the Fort is help soldiers who do get in make it in this regard, from sophisticated physical training and injury treatment to making sure they eat right for a change. The nutritious food is “a shock” to many, but “It they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat it.”
Graduation. We had been told it would be an inspiring ceremony, and it was. I was sufficiently struck with awe that I suppressed my natural inclination to say, “Where is Sgt. Hulka’s platoon?” My favorite part was when PFC Joshua Hinton was honored for being the best marksman in his training company. He’s from Jackson, TN, which is one of my hometowns (my wife and three of my kids were born there; I worked at the paper there for 10 years).
We visited a recently remodeled barracks.
We climbed the Victory Tower, which is recruits’ first big test of courage and confidence. That is to say, we climbed it by the stairs. Two of our number signed the necessary waivers and tried their hands (successfully, fortunately) at rappelling. I did not. I was afraid. Of my wife. If I had even slightly injured myself right after spending 400 bucks on a shot of cortisone next to my spine, she would never, ever have let me forget it.
Chow time! At the mess hall, I had a revelation: I always assumed that even if they had let in guys with asthma when I was young, I would have starved to death because of my food allergies. But thanks to the new, healthy menu, I had a great meal — baked salmon, rice, pinto beans, Brussels sprouts and jello. (By the way, the irony is that my allergies cause me to eat healthier than most people, and I was reasonably athletic when I was draft age, so I would probably have been in better shape than most guys who enter the Army.) We entered the mess hall early, but hundreds of soldiers came in after us — all with their rifles.
We visited an area where soldiers are taught about teamwork (as opposed to the Victory Tower, which was more about individual achievement via such means as the “quicksand” exercise — they had to work together to cross a wide expanse without touching the ground, using only two or three wooden planks. We watched a couple of groups doing it — each group worked it out slightly differently. I kept thinking about the Twins’ favorite TV show, Wonder Pets, with its song, “What’s gonna work — TEAMwork!”
Then, we saw a particularly intense exercise in which armed recruits came upon three soldiers — two real, one of them a sophisticated mannequin that could move and bleed copiously — whose humvee had just been blown up by an IED. They had to secure the area and stabilize the wounded to prepare them for evacuation, with the particular challenge being to apply tourniquets successfully to the mannequin, which had just lost both legs.

A full day, even though we were done by 2 p.m.

Below are a few of the pictures I took. Here’s a key to understanding what you’re looking at, left to right, top to bottom:

I’m sorry I missed when these soldiers’ names were announced at the start of the graduation program, but I liked the picture anyway. They were receiving a huge ovation from the crowd in the reviewing stands, right after we heard about their service in combat zones.
The five companies graduating pass before the reviewing stand. There was no Sgt. Hulka’s platoon, but they all seemed to be go-getters.
You don’t see many pay phones these days, but there were six outside the barracks we visited. Recruits are not allowed to keep cell phones.
While phoning home, the troops can continue their training by studying the chain of command, located above the phones. They are expected to know the chain of command, but they tend to have trouble with the middle parts of the chain. Few have trouble with the top or the bottom: They know who President Obama is, and they will never forget their drill instructor for the rest of their lives. I was struck by how the most faded photo was that of Sec. Gates. But then I realized, he’s had his job longer than any of the others.
The barracks. I think they told us this room was for female soldiers, but that doesn’t sound right. I looked at some of those boots atop the lockers, and they were way too big for any of the women in our tour group, near as I could tell. In the shower area (not pictured), the colonel guiding us noted that there’s not much privacy. Well… there was more privacy than in the shower room in the Honeycombs when I was at USC.
Soldiers at the Victory Tower had to stack arms before climbing.
You’re looking at soldiers atop the tower, about to rappel down a sheer 60-foot wall. I liked listening to the female instructor with the dark hair and wearing the cap, sitting right at the edge and speaking to the bareheaded soldier holding his hands up. With each recruit, she said, “Are you scared?” If they said “no,” she would say, “Well, I would be.” And then she gave them a calming spiel about how to make it through this challenge. And then they went over.
Capt. LeMay was our guide at the Victory Tower and elsewhere on our tour. I finally had to ask him. Turns out that yes, he’s the great-grandnephew of Gen. Curtis LeMay. Small world. He gets asked that a lot.
After you climb the “ladder” at right (partly seen), you rappel down the wall. I managed to suppress the temptation to take part.
Our bus was held up briefly as we waited for this armed column to pass out of our way, en route to the mess hall.
At the team training area, we walked past a company-sized group eating MREs among the trees. When next I looked that way, they were all in the prone firing position with their rifles pointing outward from their large defensive circle. I suggested that we go back another way, in case we had offended them somehow.
Gear piled up outside the building where the troops engaged in the exercises dealing with the aftermath of IED explosions.
Soldiers secure the area around a crippled humvee, while some of them try to help the wounded. The “blood” is made of corn syrup and food coloring, I believe. But it was pretty realistic, though. After they had dragged the wounded out of there and tracked it all over, it was hard to get out of the room without walking through it.
A soldier comes bursting out of the building ahead of his comrades trying to evacuate the “wounded.” I had noticed that soldiers had their names written on tape on the butts of their rifles. I didn’t notice until I was editing these photos that this guys’ said “The Situation.”
The squad awaits evac outside the building.

I’ve got video of that exercise, by the way, complete with the sound of canned gunfire to add to the soldiers’ stress level. I’ll try to post it later. We were in the room, right on top of them. Capt. Collins, who was guiding this part of the tour, told us that the Army had learned some things about staging such exercises from Hollywood. He had been through a similar exercise at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. It turned out to be a little too intense for some of the combat veterans who went through it. They had to take a break afterwards. It had been too much like what they had actually experienced in combat.

By the way, before that exercise, a sergeant demonstrated for us how to apply the high-tech tourniquets that all soldiers carry. He told us that we probably would have had as many killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the past decade as we lost in Vietnam, if not for what has been learned about treating wounds since then. If we had known then what we know today, Staff Sgt. Cheadle said, that memorial wall in Washington would be a lot smaller.

At least she probably wouldn’t have to worry about the new SC immigration law

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Lots of interesting stuff in the WSJ the last couple of days, as noted back here and here.

Today, I was struck by this piece about 22,000 immigrants who have been deeply disappointed by finding out that they did NOT win the annual green card lottery — even the though the U.S. gummint had previously told them that they HAD won. Seems there was a glitch.

There were some pretty heart-wrenching anecdotes. But the one that grabbed my attention was the one about the young woman pictured above. An excerpt:

Anna Demidchik, a 27-year-old second-year law student at Hofstra University studying immigration law, says she has entered the green-card lottery every year since 2007. She admits that she didn’t put a lot of faith in the process, so she was surprised to hear that she had won.

Born in Kazakhstan, she won a scholarship in high school to spend a year in rural South Carolina. She later studied Chinese in Russia and then enrolled in a business program in the U.S. before entering law school.

Sitting in her favorite seat in the Hofstra Law School’s student lounge, she says that after hearing she had won the lottery, she called her parents in Novosibirsk, Russia. They put their apartment up for sale so that she could take out her one-quarter share of the money—worth about $20,000—and show U.S. authorities that she would have cash to support herself in the U.S.

On May 13, her brother told her to check the Internet because the results had been invalidated. Fidgeting and clutching an 8-ounce water bottle, she said at that moment she was in the middle of final exams so “I couldn’t let myself go. But once the finals were over I spent the whole day crying.”…

The story doesn’t say where in “rural South Carolina” she spent that year. But that detail, together with her photo, caused me to have this thought: As frustrating as her situation is, there is one immigration woe she should not have. If she returned to South Carolina, she probably wouldn’t have any trouble with the new law that Nikki Haley is set to sign on Monday.

OK, technically she could be subjected to it, but it seems doubtful. I mean, if all the immigrants, legal and otherwise, in South Carolina looked like Ms. Demidchik, we wouldn’t have a new Arizona-style bill for the gov to sign.

And that’s not a reference to her beauty. It’s a reference to another sense of the word “fair.”

Apparently, the NLRB is trying to save the country from us stupid Southerners

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Meant to share this with you the other day when I saw it. It was an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, sticking up for the NLRB for attacking Boeing’s plans to produce Dreamliners in SC:

We should be aghast that Boeing is sending a big fat market signal that it wants a less-skilled, lower-quality work force. This country is in a debt crisis because we buy abroad much more than we sell. Alas, because of this trade deficit, foreign creditors have the country in their clutches. That’s not because of our labor costs—in that respect, we can undersell most of our high-wage, unionized rivals like Germany. It’s because we have too many poorly educated and low-skilled workers that are simply unable to compete.

We depend on Boeing to out-compete Airbus, its European rival. But when major firms move South, it is usually a harbinger of quality decline. Over and over as a labor lawyer in the 1980s and ’90s, I saw companies move away from Chicago, where the pay was $28 an hour, to some place in South Carolina or Louisiana where the pay was about half that. While these moves aggrieved me as a union lawyer, it might have consoled me as an American if those companies went on to thrive globally.

But too often, alas, it was the beginning of the end, as it was for Outboard Marine Corporation, where I once represented workers. In the 1990s the company went from the high wage union North to the low wage South and was bankrupt by 2000. There are reasons workers in the North get $28 an hour while down in the South they get $14 or even $10. Adam Smith could explain it: “productivity,” “skill level,” “quality.”

Here is yet another American firm seeking to ruin its reputation for quality. Why? To save $14 an hour!…

This gross insult not only to SC workers, but to the ability of our technical college system to train them (which the system is perfectly capable of doing — ask BMW), is apparently supported by nothing more substantial than the fact that in SC, we will work for less money. I don’t suppose you can be in actual need of a job unless you’re a stupid Southerner, huh?

This was so over-the-top that I found myself wondering: Did the WSJ deliberately pick this piece because it was so ham-handed, just to make the NLRB’s case look worse than it already did? Surely not.

A bloody triumph at the convention center

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Well, once again, I forgot to tell you about a blood drive beforehand so you could participate.

But this time, it didn’t matter. I am happy to report that the American Red Cross’ Famously Hot Blood Drive at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center today was hugely successful.

The goal was 100 donors. Red Cross Donor Recruitment Representative Kelly Moore told me late this afternoon that when it was all over, 160 had given.

You’ll note the row of seated Columbians above waiting their turn. There was another full row behind them, and it was like that much of the day.

Of course, I did my bit (come on, you knew that you wouldn’t get all the way through this post without a little self-aggrandizement from your humble correspondent). I gave double-red cells, because I’m just that sort of overachiever. Also, I think it’s cool the way they take the blood out, remove red cells and put it back (quite literally cool, because it’s not as warm as it was when it went out, having been mixed with a bit of saline to replace volume). I was a little worried that I couldn’t. You know how I occasionally fall short on the iron standard. Well, my ruse of buying some iron pills and taking a double-dose last night, and that much again this morning, worked — I scored a 14 on the test. Yes! Aced it, by cramming.

Anyway, I’ll try to remember to tell y’all ahead of time next time. But this time it worked out great anyway. Congratulations, and thanks, to Red Cross Blood Services, to the Columbia Rotary Club (quite a few members showed up), and to all those other folks who showed up to give.

bradwarthen.com

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